Saturday, October 31, 2015

To add to the my list of hobby projects, I created a fork of an addon for Kodi that provides browsing of videos on Microsoft Channel9. This was my first attempt at a Kodi addon, and really my first time working with writing python. I started out by just reading over the original code and tweaking it a bit because some things were not working. Then I started following the pattern that existed and implementing new features, like being able to browse Channel9 authors, and Channel9 events.

Once I got these features in place, I started doing some real refactoring of the original code base. There was a ton of code that was duplicated in multiple places. I spent a few hours of the day really rewriting the entire addon. As the project stands right now, it is basically a complete rewrite of the original addon.

Sunday, October 4, 2015

Over the weekend I was bored and decided to start a project to automate the process of standing up an IE VM with powershell. I would like to introduce PSIEVM. A powershell module that allows you to stand up an IE VM in VirtualBox (other hosts coming in the future) in one line.

PS> Get-IEVM –OS Win7 –IEVersion 9

That is the simplest form of the command.

Installation

To install, download from the github project releases page and extract to $env:USERPROFILE\WindowsPowerShell\Modules. Then to use it just import it

The version of IE. This is dependant on the version of Windows (See the table below).

6

7

8

9

10

11

Edge

Shares

NO

String[]

[Empty]

These are the paths to add as a share in the VM through the VMHost. May not be fully supported in all VMHosts.

AlternateVMLocation

NO

String

[Empty]

By default the VM images will be downloaded from Microsoft, but if you have the images downloaded already, you can use this to tell the script where to get them. This can be a URL, Network Share, or a local path. The images need to follow the following pattern:

To add to the my list of hobby projects, I created a fork of an addon for Kodi that provides browsing of videos on Microsoft Channel9. This was my first attempt at a Kodi addon, and really my first time working with writing python. I started out by just reading over the original code and tweaking it a bit because some things were not working. Then I started following the pattern that existed and implementing new features, like being able to browse Channel9 authors, and Channel9 events.

Once I got these features in place, I started doing some real refactoring of the original code base. There was a ton of code that was duplicated in multiple places. I spent a few hours of the day really rewriting the entire addon. As the project stands right now, it is basically a complete rewrite of the original addon.

Over the weekend I was bored and decided to start a project to automate the process of standing up an IE VM with powershell. I would like to introduce PSIEVM. A powershell module that allows you to stand up an IE VM in VirtualBox (other hosts coming in the future) in one line.

PS> Get-IEVM –OS Win7 –IEVersion 9

That is the simplest form of the command.

Installation

To install, download from the github project releases page and extract to $env:USERPROFILE\WindowsPowerShell\Modules. Then to use it just import it

The version of IE. This is dependant on the version of Windows (See the table below).

6

7

8

9

10

11

Edge

Shares

NO

String[]

[Empty]

These are the paths to add as a share in the VM through the VMHost. May not be fully supported in all VMHosts.

AlternateVMLocation

NO

String

[Empty]

By default the VM images will be downloaded from Microsoft, but if you have the images downloaded already, you can use this to tell the script where to get them. This can be a URL, Network Share, or a local path. The images need to follow the following pattern: